The community and aged care sector is a transforming industry. There is mounting pressure to provide superior services to customers in an increasingly competitive and consumer directed market. Calvary Community Care initiated a transformational approach to meet these challenges with a “GROW” program to improve manager’s abilities to support and develop staff. From past experience Calvary knew that without a focus on learning transfer the initiative would be a great ‘training’ initiative, but would fail to create behavioural change. To ensure that the organisational outcomes were met, they made a commitment to have an internal learning transfer team who would support managers to sustain learning and contribute to improved business outcomes.
THE APPROACH:
A cross-functional learning transfer team was created, predominately from learning but also with members from across the business. It was essential that this team had the required skills to deliver effective learning transfer and they were trained to deliver the Turning Learning into Action™ (TLA) methodology. This training included a 2-day TLA workshop where they could learn and apply the tools and skills, followed up with individual phone TLA sessions. TLA is essentially an advanced coaching methodology with specific and structured reflection on a personal action plan. Once the team had been fully upskilled, the internal learning transfer team began delivering short, sharp 30-minute TLA sessions to support managers who were participating in the “GROW” program. They delivered 4 sessions over 3-4 months for each cohort. Participants’ managers joined the final call to discuss wins, any remaining challenges, and to put together a plan of how they can work together going forward to continue the learning and change. During the 6 month process the Learning Transfer team had their own TLA support and mentoring which included a ‘hotline’ to Lever to ensure smooth and effective delivery. Support also included access to example audios or session hot spots and themes.
Benefits for the organisation:
- Before this initiative performance conversations were often a compliance-based exercise that didn’t add any value. As part of the GROW focus the conversations have become more productive, meaningful and of a higher quality
- The CEO of Calvary personally congratulated the learning transfer team as participants had called her directly saying how amazing the process is.
- There was a resulting four-fold uplift in learning budget because the organisation has finally started to see the results that effective learning transfer can produce.
- The TLA process is now considered as a key component of all training programs requiring behavioural change.
Benefits for the learners
- Learners achieved a 111% uplift in progressing their goals from the end of the workshop to the end of the learning transfer sessions.
- Learners have rated a 60% uplift in being able to achieve their goals with the support of TLA.
- An average score of 8.9 out of 10 for the likelihood of recommending the transfer of learning to a friend
- An average score of 4.2 out of 5 on the importance of their manager joining their learning transfer process
- An average score of 3.7 out of 5 in the development of key leadership areas as a result of GROW and TLA.
Benefits for the learning team
As well as the organisational outcomes there were some unanticipated benefits for the learning team. The process has fundamentally shifted the team from being seen as collaborators to now being both collaborators and influencers. The process gave them some valuable insights into the organisation, enabling them to work much closer. The TLA principles have been transferable to other projects and the process is being embedded into other learning initiatives to continue the impact. In addition, the increase in job satisfaction for the learning team has been significant to go from delivering outcomes to truly making a difference to the organisation.
